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It's Time To Take Back Instant Messaging
Enigma5O writes "The TechZone says the world of instant messaging is a disjointed mess, and it's time for a citizen's revolt. From the article: "The obstacles in this case are three big companies: AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Each wants to keep their networks closed, thereby forcing consumers to use their brand of software and effectively using their size to eliminate competition. Five years ago, Yahoo! and Microsoft were calling for then-leader AOL/ICQ to open their network to allow others to compete. They even successfully petitioned the FCC to restrict AOL's future developments before approving the AOL/Time Warner merger. When it was convenient for their business goals, Microsoft and Yahoo! waved the interoperability flag, but now that both companies have built substantial IM communities with their own closed networks, they have lost their passion for open networks.""
Add Skype to the list, for there are many people who use it as an IM app. It would be great if we could unify the different protocols and have one big IM network. I, for one, hate to need different accounts here and there to be able to talk to my friends.
Global warming is a cube.
Go peer-to-peer, using each other's IP address.
To discover someone's IP address, just e-mail your contacts a special message from which their IM will update it's table of address. Polling will check whether one is available or not.
Yes, it's time to take back our IM!!!
Ok. Long time IRC user/admin here. And even if I may have agreed with you 5 years earlier, now I absolutely don't :).
:) We need another protocol, because IRC is outdated, but it's stupid to create a brand new protocol when Jabber has everything we need. MUC is the way to go. But it misses the good ol' IRC spirit and population (there are 3 pilgrims on MUC for now). See my message above yours for a good reason. I'm working on eliminating any good reason to remain on IRC.
:)
I have coded bots, hacked IRC daemons many times (Unreal or Bahamut), coded my own IRC services (bots that fake themselves as servers to get the full network image). It sucks. It's only hacks. Bad hacks.
We need a protocol which supports extensibility in the first place. Something like XML. Oh, wait, isn't Jabber XML-based?
You don't "hack" Jabber. Or if you call it hack, it's clever, academic and well-designed hack which won't break anything else. It's easily extensible with JEPs (Jabber Extension Protocols). It rocks.
Now there's still a huge paradigm shift between IM and Traditional Chat à la IRC. But Jabber supports MUCs (Multi User Chats) which are very IRC-like. I hope someday IRC will remain just as an attraction, a museum for your grandkids "Hey grandpa, did you really chat on something THAT badly designed?"
Don't get me wrong: I love IRC, I have spent years on it, and had good laughs. But it was because of the community, of the general IRC spirit. It must not die. But the protocol is crappy, has tons of weirdness and exceptions, really WRONG word-splitting and is FAR TOO MUCH limited.
It may be a little soon to forget IRC. But I'm working on it. I'm working on making all of us forget IRC
Stay tuned
So why do you think Microsoft and AOL provide this free (beer) service? As an act of charity? And why do you think that they have had such strong resistance to inter-operation? Bad hair day?
Both companies believe that they can use IM as a platform to make money, or as a platform to lock people into other services that cost money. Otherwise they wouldn't be providing the service and resisting inter-operation. Both companies sell enterprise servers that can be used within corporate environments to provide features unavailable with the free client. You can bet that any "innovations" will appear in that environment and not in the free version.
For instance, there is a limited number of contacts that you can use in MSN, but that limit is removed with the enterprise server. For many people thats not an issue, but I know of a lot of helpdesk and GNOC people who need more than an average number of contacts, and they run into the limit all the time. If I try to create a new inovative service that runs on top of IM networks, I will need to pay a tithe to Microsoft to use more than the limited number of contacts they allow. If Microsoft didn't like my new service they could block it at the server and I would be powerless to stop them, and even today my choice of alternate providers would be quite limited.
Microsoft has already started to talk about integrating MSIM into exchange and outlook. Just one more example of how Microsoft can extend one monopoly into another, and how they plan to tie IM inovations to overpriced software.
Your grocery store is about as lame an analogy as I have ever seen, but I will attempt to use it to show where you are confused. I can go to any grocery store I like and buy a bag of apples, bring them home, and bake a pie with ingredients purchased at any other store I like, and the grocery store has no way to stop me. There is no such promise with MSIM or AIM.
Yes there is _some_ choice of clients at present, but that is only by fiat of Microsoft and AOL. They can use encryption and soon trusted computing to lock out competing clients, or to charge competing vendors licensing if they want to inter-operate. This is not a question of "if", but "when". At some point they _will_ see an opportunity and they _will_ take it.
I don't want to have to rely on Microsoft and AOL to give me permission to use IM or whatever new innovations are be created to use an IM network. Not when it is possible to have an open network to provide the same thing. This is not a case of trading multiple providers for one. It is trading three providers for as many others that want to enter the market. Yes, the core protocols will be the same. But that stops nobody from extending them or adding additional features to clients. Open standards provide a common platform from which anyone can inovate, while closed standards limit inovation to the corporations in power.
The Jabber network really is the answer here, and with Google's new involvement, and commitment to support S2S federation we might stand a chance to make this part of the Internet as free (as in speech) as HTTP and SMTP are today. In fact, this may be our only chance.
Try to look past the next year when thinking about what direction we want our network to go. Less corporate control will always be preferable in the log term, even if it is not in the short term.
XML is the best data format; unless your data needs to be read or written by a human or a computer.
Yeah, citizen's revolt my ass. There's Jabber servers aplenty, but lets see anyone join that disjointed mess into something cohesive. That's the real fragmentation. Who is going to gather the resources together and risk a real assault against the big IM? Google has done it - their IM had some real word of mouth behind it at the beginning, but who's talking about it these days?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."